10Days

Building a brand community for a national clean water campaign

STRATEGY, IDENTITY, COMMUNITY

The Problem: In 2007, When Embassy CEO Henry Proegler was a student at Texas A&M, he learned about the global water crisis and asked his community to give up every beverage but water for ten days, and then donate the money saved to dig clean water wells in Rwanda. The 10 Days campaign grew, and in 2010 Living Water International adopted it as their official college advocacy program. With nothing but a cubicle and a Wi-Fi password, Proegler developed the 10 Days brand, created a marketing strategy, and brought the 10 Days to more than 30 campuses. The 10 Days was growing, but it lacked the proper organizational infrastructure needed to continue to scale and maximize the campaign’s impact.

What We Did: Successful brand communities don’t happen naturally; they’re created, and they thrive when there’s a healthy amount of structure paired with ownership. The problem is that creating these communities is a complex, labor-intensive process that involves visual design, copywriting, marketing and communications, and brand narrative strategy.

Embassy’s Brand Community Map simplifies and takes the guesswork out of this process, providing brands with a data- and narrative-focused approach to building communities.

With the 10 Days, we started by mapping out the various levels of involvement and their interactions with each other within the campaign. From there, we designed the 10 Days user journey map to guide each relationship level at various points of the campaign.

We used the Brand Community Map to target each audience with specific communications and actions, which allowed us to recruit, empower, and mobilize the community more effectively.

Our team designed and oversaw the creation of an innovative digital fundraising platform that provided the unifying structure needed to effectively develop grassroots campaigns. Through this web platform, users can create teams, submit monetary pledges, track donations, and invite their communities to participate. The platform also captures data that makes it possible to predict year-to-year outcomes and projected impact.

For the 2016 10 Days, Embassy led a 100% increase in school recruitment and produced dozens of pieces of collateral, including a campaign video, student leader training materials, an email campaign, digital resources, and social media assets. In total, more than 1,600 participants raised over $122,000 for safe water projects in Rwanda.